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Welcome back to George vs the Listener Crossword, battling deadlines and being pretty terrible at these things for nearly a decade.

I’m going to work in reverse order and hopefully get caught up over the weekend. My crappy grids for the last two are posted for your confusion and vicarious enjoyment.

So what’s next? KevGar! Wasn’t all that long ago we had a KevGar challenge – and thus far KevGar has regaled us with Wittgenstein, Haydn, Virgil and Carroll, so this is likely to be musical or literary. We have an address, stuff to highlight, jigsaws and two letters in some cells which are missing in wordplay. Gak!

On the plus side, all four 12-letter entries interlock, so maybe I I can work with that.

There is a first clue, and it’s one with missing letters – A,BA(+CI), so woohoo and a big pass on the first clue in a jigsaw test. My approach to jigsaws with the clues in alphabetical order is to do two runs through the clues, first one to see how many I can get, and then go back to see what I can get the second time perhaps knowing what the first letter is going to be. This approach netted me two of the 12-letter entries, both of the 8-letter entries and three of the 7-letter entries. That was enough to get going on the grid!

Other discoveries popped out – I wasn’t sure if any clue was going to have more than one set of unindicated letters, but surely that was (+EN)(+IS)LE with only two of six letters indicated. If that was the case then maybe (+LI)(+EG)E worked as well.

This was a puzzle the rewarded poking and prodding – it took about four solving sessions before I had two-thirds of the grid filled, and the spotting of AULD LANG SYNE as a possibility down the long diagonal helped in the final hurdle of grid filling.

With just a few clues left, I was trying to decipher the message – I think I googled “FAIR FAIR YOUR FACE” to eventually find what we were looking for – ADDRESS TO A HAGGIS by Robert Burns. Must have been a significant anniversary, as there was another puzzle with this as the theme that I started on just after finishing this one. Is that puzzle still live? Whoops.

I’d seen EDINBURGH appear reversed in the final column, and a quick trip to a page of Burns poems shows that there was an address to EDINBURGH, also to the UNCO GUID (how do you become a member of that?), the DEIL and a TOOTHACHE.

Where is Burns these days? We could use addresses to MANSPLAINERS, CRACKED CELLPHONE SCREENS and HASTILY-THROWN-TOGETHER MICROBREWERIES.

Another intriguing literary challenge from KevGar. I found it the most difficult of the KevGar puzzles so far, but I think I’ve got it all out, and can call this one a Victory to George. Game over – 100% completion!

Feel free to tell me I should not even bother to go back and update the last few, it’s not as if Schadenfreude cares what I think, and see you next week, possibly in a timely fashion, when Ifor attempts to harm us with fractions.